World Government

First published Mon Dec 4, 2006; substantive revision Mon Jul 2, 2012

‘World government’ refers to the idea of all humankind
united under one common political authority. Arguably, it has not
existed so far in human history, yet proposals for a unified global
political authority have existed since ancient times—in the
ambition of kings, popes and emperors, and the dreams of poets and
philosophers.

Proponents of world government offer distinct reasons for
why it is an ideal of political organization. Some are
motivated negatively and see world government as the
definitive solution to old and new human problems such as war and the
development of weapons of mass destruction, global poverty and
inequality, and environmental degradation. More positively, some have
advocated world government as a proper reflection of the unity of the
cosmos, under reason or God. Proponents have also differed historically
in their views of the form that a world government should
take. While medieval thinkers advocated world government under a single
monarch or emperor who would possess supreme authority over all other
lesser rulers, modern proponents generally do not advocate a wholesale
dismantling of the sovereign states system but incremental innovations
in global institutional design to move humanity toward world federalism
or cosmopolitan democracy.

Critics of world government have offered three main kinds of
objections—to do with the feasibility, desirability and
necessity of establishing a common global political authority.

First, a realist argument, advanced by contemporary
international ‘realist’ theorists, holds that world
government is infeasible; ideas of world government constitute
exercises in utopian thinking, and are utterly impractical as a goal
for human political organization. Assuming that world government would
lead to desirable outcomes such as perpetual peace, realists are
skeptical that world government will ever materialize as an
institutional reality, given the problems of egoistic or corrupted
human nature, or the logic of international anarchy that characterizes
a world of states, all jealously guarding their own sovereignty or
claims to supreme authority. World government is thus infeasible as a
solution to global problems because of the unsurpassable difficulties
of establishing “authoritative hierarchies” at the global
or international level (Krasner 1999, 42). A related
consequentialist argument speculates that even if world
government were desirable, the process of creating a world government
may produce more harm than good; the necessary evils committed on the
road to establishing a world government would outweigh whatever
benefits might result from its achievement (Rousseau 1756/1917).

Second, even if world government were shown to be a feasible
political project, it may be an undesirable one. One set of reasons for
its undesirability emphasizes the potential power and oppressiveness of
a global political authority. In one version of this
objection—the tyranny argument—world government would descend
into a global tyranny, hindering rather than enhancing the ideal of
human autonomy (Kant 1991). Instead of delivering impartial global
justice and peace, a world government may form an inescapable tyranny
that would have the power to make humanity serve its own interests, and
opposition against which might engender incessant and intractable civil
wars (Waltz 1979). In another version of this objection—the
homogeneity argument—world government may be so strong
and pervasive as to create a homogenizing effect, obliterating distinct
cultures and communities that are intrinsically valuable. The
institution of a world government would thus destroy the rich social
pluralism that animates human life (Walzer 2004). While the preceding
two arguments stem from fear of the potential power of a world
government, another set of concerns that make world government
undesirable focuses on its potential weakness as a form of political
organization. The objections on this account are that the inevitable
remoteness of a global political authority would dilute the laws,
making them ineffectual and meaningless. The posited weakness of world
government thus leads to objections based on its potential
inefficiency and soullessness (Kant 1991).

Third, contemporary liberal theorists argue mainly that world
government, in the form of a global leviathan with supreme legislative,
executive, adjudicative and enforcement powers, is largely unnecessary
to solve problems such as war, global poverty, and environmental
catastrophe. World government so conceived is neither necessary nor
sufficient to achieve the aims of a liberal agenda. Even cosmopolitan
liberals do not argue that moral cosmopolitanism necessarily entails
political cosmopolitanism in the form of a world government. The
liberal rejection of world government, however, does not amount to an
endorsement of the conventional system of sovereign states or the
contemporary international order, “with its extreme injustices,
crippling poverty, and inequalities” (Rawls 1999, 117). Instead,
most liberal theorists envision the need for authoritative
international and global institutions that modify significantly the
powers and prerogatives traditionally attributed to the sovereign
state.

This entry will, first, discuss the positive and negative
motivations underlying proposals for world government. In a selective
discussion of the idea's history, the entry will focus on
Dante's medieval treatise on the necessity of a world monarch or
emperor, and then consider mainly arguments by Hobbes, Rousseau and
Kant that reveal more skepticism about world government as a solution
to the problem of war and peace among sovereign states. Most of the
objections against the idea of world government outlined above are
articulated in their writings. The historical background section will
continue with the revival of ideas of world government in the twentieth
century, prompted by technological progress, economic globalization,
and the experience of two devastating world wars. Debates about world
government during the Cold War, however, were pervaded by the
ideological division of the world, and the section concludes with an
exploration of socialist views on world government.

Second, the entry will explore debates in contemporary theory. One
set of debates is located within international relations theory,
between realist and neorealist, ‘international society’,
liberal internationalist, republican, and constructivist schools. A
second set of discussions about world government is located within
contemporary liberal theory, involving the foremost liberal political
philosopher of the twentieth century, John Rawls, and his cosmopolitan
liberal critics. A third set of debates has emerged among contemporary
republican, democratic and critical theorists. There is lively debate
within and between these sets of discussions about the feasibility,
desirability and necessity of the political project of establishing a
world sovereign state with some measure of coercive, centralized global
authority. While the idea of world government has experienced an
intellectual resurgence in the past five years, it coexists with the
concept of “global governance,” which highlights the
increasing agency of global civil society and nonstate actors, and
deliberately eschews the coercive and centralized components of
domestic models of government for looser, decentralized modes of
achieving similar functions of government. The conclusion to the entry
questions whether global governance without world government in
contemporary world conditions can really deliver the goods of global
security, universal human rights, social justice, and environmental
protection that have made the ideal of world government a persistent if
elusive human aspiration.

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders that
would be;
…
Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags
were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the
world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm
in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal
law.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall” (1837)

United States President Harry Truman, who oversaw the founding of
the United Nations after the Second World War, kept these lines from
Tennyson's poem in his wallet (Kennedy 2006, xi). After this
brutal global war that claimed over fifty million lives, just like
after the previous world war in which almost ten million perished,
ordinary people and statespersons alike sought to establish a post-war
international order that would be able to prevent another war of global
devastation from occurring. In fact, since the problem of war, or
large-scale socially organized violence, has been with us throughout
human history, the ideal of a universal community of humankind living
in perpetual peace was not at all new.

Derek Heater's history of ideas of world government and
citizenship begins by noting their presence in ancient Chinese and
Indian as well as Graeco-Roman thought (1996, ix–x). According to
Heater, the concept of human unity produced an ideal that such unity
ought to be expressed in political form. The exact nature of that form,
however, has changed radically over time. While Stoic ideas about the
oneness of the universe were politically inchoate, they inspired
medieval Christian proposals for a global political authority; at the
same time, the historical model of imperial Rome (or its myths)
inspired medieval quests for world empire.

The Italian poet, philosopher, and statesperson, Dante (1265–1321),
perhaps best articulated the Christian ideal of human unity and its
expression through a world governed by a universal monarch. In The
Banquet [Convivio], Dante argued that wars and all their
causes would be eliminated if “the whole earth and all that
humans can possess be a monarchy, that is, one government under one
ruler. Because he possesses everything, the ruler would not desire to
possess anything further, and thus, he would hold kings contentedly
within the borders of their kingdoms, and keep peace among them”
(Convivio, 169). In Monarchia [1309–13] (1995, 13), a full
political treatise affirming universal monarchy, Dante draws on
Aristotle to argue that human unity stems from a shared end, purpose or
function, to develop and realize fully and constantly humanity's
distinct intellectual potential. In Book I, Dante argues that peace is
a vital condition for realizing this end, and peace cannot be
maintained if humanity is divided. Just as “[e]very kingdom
divided against itself shall be laid waste” (15), since humankind
shares one goal, “there must therefore be one person who directs
and rules mankind, and he is properly called ‘Monarch’ or
‘Emperor’. And thus it is apparent that the well-being of
the world requires that there be a monarchy or empire” (15). Most
importantly, when conflicts inevitably arise between two rulers who are
equals, “there must be a third party of wider jurisdiction who
rules over both of them by right”; a universal monarch is
necessary as “a first and supreme judge, whose judgment resolves
all disputes either directly or indirectly” (21–2). In the
absence of a universal monarch, humanity is “transformed into a
many-headed beast,” striving after “conflicting
things” (43–4); humankind ordered under a universal monarch,
however, “will most closely resemble God, by mirroring the
principle of oneness or unity of which he is the supreme example”
(xvii and 19). Dante completes his treatise by extolling the Roman
Empire as “a part of God's providential plan for
humanity” (xxxiii). And while Dante argued for a universal
emperor whose temporal power was distinct from the pope's
religious power, and not derivative from the latter, he envisioned that
God's will must require pope and emperor to forge a cooperative
and conciliatory, rather than competitive and antagonistic,
relationship.

The idea of uniting humanity under one empire or monarch, however,
became an ambivalent appeal by the seventeenth century with the
entrenchment of the system of sovereign states after the Peace of
Westphalia (1648).

In Leviathan [1651], Hobbes (1588–1679) gave the
quintessential formulation of sovereignty as supreme legal coercive
authority over a particular population and territory. Hobbes argued
that although mutual vulnerabilities and interests lead individuals to
give up their liberties in the state of nature, in exchange for
protection—thereby instituting sovereign states—the
miseries that accompany a plurality of sovereign states are not as
onerous to individuals, hence there is less rational basis for
political organization to move towards a global leviathan:
“because states uphold the Industry of their Subjects; there does
not follow from the international state of nature, that misery, which
accompanies the Liberty of particular men” (1986, 188). Contrary
to realist interpretations of Hobbes in international relations
thought, Hobbes did not consider international law or cooperation
between sovereign states to be impossible or impractical. Anticipating
the development of international law, collective security
organizations, the League of Nations and the United Nations, he
affirmed the possibility and efficacy of leagues of commonwealths
founded on the interests of states in peace and justice: “Leagues
between Common-wealths, over whom there is no humane Power established,
to keep them all in awe, are not onely lawfull [because they are
allowed by the commonwealth], but also profitable for the time they
last” (286). In Hobbes, we find the first articulation of the
argument that a world government or state is unnecessary, although he
envisaged that the development of a lawful interstate order is
possible, and potentially desirable.

In the eighteenth century, Charles Castel, Abbé de
Saint-Pierre (1658–1743), in his Project for Making Peace Perpetual
in Europe [1713], extended Hobbes's argument that a rational
interest in self-preservation necessitated the creation a domestic
leviathan to the international realm, asserting that reason should lead
the princes of Europe to form a federation of states by social
contract. The contracting sovereigns would form a perpetual and
irrevocable alliance, establishing a permanent Diet or Congress that
would adjudicate all conflicts between the contracting parties. The
federation would also proscribe as “a public enemy”
(Rousseau 1756/1917, 63) any member who breaks the Treaty or disregards the
decisions of the congress; in such a situation, all members would
“arm and take the offensive, conjointly and at the common
expense, against any State put to the ban of Europe” in order to
enforce the decisions of the federation (61–4). In other words,
perpetual peace can be achieved if the princes of Europe would agree to
relinquish their sovereign rights to make war or peace to a superior,
federal body that guaranteed protection of their basic interests.

In his comments on this proposal, Rousseau (1712–78) acknowledged
its perfect rationality: “Realize this Commonwealth of
Europe for a single day, and you may be sure it will last forever; so
fully would experience convince men that their own gain is to be found
in the good of all” (93). To Rousseau, however, existing
societies had so thoroughly corrupted humans' natural innocence
that they were largely incapable of discovering their true or real
interests. Thus, the Abbé's proposals were not utopian,
but they were not likely to be realized “because men are crazy,
and to be sane in a world of madmen is itself a kind of madness”
(91). At the same time, Rousseau noted that the sovereigns of Europe
were not likely to agree voluntarily to form such a federation,
generating a consequentialist objection to the proposal: “No
Federation could ever be established except by a revolution. That being
so, which of us would dare say whether the League of Europe is a thing
more to be desired or feared? It would perhaps do more harm in the
moment than it would guard against for ages” (112).

Rousseau viewed war as a product of defectively ordered social
institutions; it is states as public entities that make war, and
individuals participate in wars only as members or citizens of states.
Far from viewing the achievement of a domestic leviathan as moral
progress, Rousseau noted that the condition of a world of entangled
sovereign states puts human beings in more peril than if no such
institutions existed at all. Isn't it the case, he argued, that
“each one of us being in the civil state as regards our fellow
citizens, but in the state of nature as regards the rest of the world,
we have taken all kinds of precautions against private wars only to
kindle national wars a thousand times more terrible? And that, in
joining a particular group of men, we have really declared ourselves
the enemies of the whole race” (56)? In Rousseau's view,
the solution to war is to establish well-governed societies, along the
lines he established in The Social Contract [1762]; only in
such contexts will human beings realize their full rational and moral
potential. To establish perpetual peace, then, we should not pursue
world government, but the moral perfection of states. A world of ideal
societies would have no cause for war, and no need for world
government.

Kant tried, in his Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Purpose [1784], to refute the claim that the
development of the domestic state constituted a moral step backwards
for humankind, by placing it and its trials “in the history of
the entire species, as a steadily advancing but slow development of
man's original [rational] capacities” (41). Nature employs
the “unsociableness of men” to motivate moral progress;
thus war is a means by which nature moves states “to take the
step which reason could have suggested to them even without so many sad
experiences—that of abandoning a lawless state of savagery and
entering a federation of peoples in which every state, even the
smallest, could expect to derive its security and rights not from its
own power or its own legal judgment, but solely from this great
federation (FoedusAmphictyonum), from a united power
and the law-governed decisions of a united will” (47). This
is the “inevitable outcome” (48) of human history, a point
Kant reiterated in Perpetual Peace [1795], when he argued that
rationality dictated the formation of “an international state
(civitas gentium), which would necessarily continue to grow until
it embraced all the peoples of the earth” (105).

In present conditions, however, Kant noted that “the positive
idea of a world republic cannot be realized,” thus his
treatise on perpetual peace begins with the social fact of a world of
distinct but interacting states. What would be required, given such a
world, to achieve perpetual peace? Kant makes three arguments. First,
every state must have a republican constitution that guarantees the
freedom and equality of citizens through the rule of law and
representative political institutions. The internally well-ordered
republican state is less likely to engage in wars without good reason;
“under a constitution where the subject is not a citizen, and
which is therefore not republican, it is the simplest thing in the
world to go to war” (100). Second, such internally well-ordered
states would need to enter into a “federation of peoples,”
which is distinct from an “international state” (102). A
“pacific federation (foedus pacificum) … does not
aim to acquire any power like that of a state, but merely to preserve
and secure the freedom of each state in itself, along with that of the
other confederated states” (104). In this context, a federal
union of free and independent states, he argued, “is still to be
preferred to an amalgamation of the separate nations under a single
power which has overruled the rest and created a universal
monarchy.” His reasons against a universal monarchy combine fears
of an all-powerful and powerless world government: “For the laws
progressively lose their impact as the government increases its range,
and a soulless despotism, after crushing the germs of goodness, will
finally lapse into anarchy” (113). Most forcefully articulating
the tyranny objection, Kant argued that a “universal
despotism” would end “in the graveyard of freedom”
(114). The third condition for perpetual peace in a world of distinct
but interacting states is the observance of cosmopolitan right, which
Kant limits to universal hospitality. Although the human race shares in
common a right to the earth's surface, Kant argued that strangers
do not have entitlements to settle on foreign territory without the
inhabitants' agreement. Thus, cosmopolitan right justifies
visiting a foreign land, but not conquering it, which Kant criticized
the commercial states of his day to have done in “America, the
negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape” and East India
(106).

Kant's views on the desirability of world government are
clearly complex (Kokaz 2005, 87–92, and Pogge 2009). His endorsement of
the ideal of human unity prompts him to see a world republic, under
which free and equal individuals, united by one global sovereign, would
achieve a “fully juridical condition” (Pogge 2009, 198), as
the ideal end of the progress of human history. At the same time, he
condemns any move towards a universal monarchy, because a monarchy, in
contrast to a republic, does not guarantee, but undermines, the freedom
and equality of individuals. Although a world republic is Kant's
ultimate political ideal, a universal despotic monarch that exercises
power arbitrarily is equivalent to a global anarchic state of nature,
which is his ultimate dystopia. In between lies his “realistic
utopia” (Rawls 1999:11–6) consisting of a federation of free
(republican) states short of a world state. As Habermas has put it,
“This weak conception of a voluntary association of states that
are willing to coexist peacefully while nevertheless retaining their
sovereignty seemed to recommend itself as a transitional stage en route
to a world republic” (2010, 268).

Kant's work shows that even in the eighteenth century, debates
about world government were alive and well, including arguments by
radical political cosmopolitans such as Anarcharsis Cloots
(Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grace, baron de Cloots, 1755–1794), who used
social contract theory to advocate the abolition of the sovereign
states system in favor of a universal republic encompassing all
humanity (Kleingeld and Brown 2002).

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed revivals of
proposals for world government that were fueled by positive
developments—such as technological progress in travel and
communications that enabled rapid economic globalization—as
well as negative developments—such as the devastating impact of
wars fought with modern technology.

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic
scientists lobbied for the international control of atomic energy as a
main function of world federalist government. Albert Einstein wrote in
1946 that technological developments had shrunk the planet, through
increased economic interdependence and mutual vulnerability through
weapons of mass destruction. To secure peace, Einstein asserted,
“A world government must be created which is able to solve
conflicts between nations by judicial decision. This government must be
based on a clear-cut constitution which is approved by the governments
and nations and which gives it the sole disposition of offensive
weapons” (1956, 138). Organizations such as the United World
Federalists (UWF), established in 1947, called for the transformation
of the United Nations into a universal federation of states with powers
to control armaments. World peace required that states should give up
their traditional unrestricted sovereign rights to amass weapons and
wage war, and that they should submit their disputes to authoritative
international institutions of adjudication and enforcement; world peace
would only be achieved through the establishment of world law (Clark
and Sohn 1962).

Calls for world government in the post-World War Two era implied a
deep suspicion about the sovereign state's potential as a vehicle
for moral progress in world politics. Emery Reves' influential
The Anatomy of Peace, is a condemnation of the nation-state as
a political institution: “The modern Bastille is the
nation-state, no matter whether the jailers are conservative, liberal
or socialist” (1945, 270). Echoing Rousseau, Reves argued that
nation-states threaten human peace, justice and freedom, by diverting
funds from important needs, prolonging a global climate of mistrust and
fear, and creating a war machine that ultimately precipitates actual
war. The experience of the world wars thus made it especially difficult
to view states as agents of moral progress. David Mitrany, perhaps
motivated by such suspicions, bracketed the idea of a world federation
or world state, and focused on the role that “a spreading web of
international activities and agencies” could play in the pursuit
of world integration and peace (2003, 101).

Some did not reject the nation-state per se, but only
authoritarian nondemocratic states as unfit partners for building a
peaceful world order. The Atlantic Union Committee (AUC), formed in
1949 by Clarence Streit, for example, called for a federal union of
democratic states that would be the genesis of a “free world
government, as nations are encouraged by example to practice the
principles which would make them eligible for membership, namely the
principles of representative government and protection of individual
liberty by law” (quoted in Baratta 2004, 470).

In the context of the Cold War (1945–89), however, the division
of the world into two ideologically opposed camps—led by the
United States (US) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR)—produced mutual distrust that pervaded the reception of
all proposals for world government. Soviet opposition to all Western
proposals as attempts to impose “American monopolistic
capitalism” on the world (Goodman 1953, 234) made the world
federalist movement's goal of establishing a universal federation
infeasible. The Soviet leadership also condemned the AUC's proposal
for an exclusive union of democracies as part of the Cold War
rivalry—an attempt to strengthen the anti-communist
(anti-Soviet) bloc.

In a distorted fashion, the Soviet Union became the historical
manifestation of socialist or communist thought. Socialist ideas can be
traced back to the French Revolution, but developed more fully as a
response to negative aspects of the rapid growth of industry in the
nineteenth century. At the same time that technological advancements
promised great material progress, the changes they wrought in social
and economic relations were not all positive. While the many workers,
or “proletarians,” in new industrial factories worked under
terrible conditions for meager wages, the few factory owners,
“the bourgeoisie” or “capitalists,” amassed
great wealth and power. According to Karl Marx, human history is a
history of struggles not between nations or states, but between
classes, created and destroyed by changing modes of production. The
state as a centralized, coercive authority emerges under social modes
of production at a certain stage of development, and is only necessary
in a class society as the coercive instrument of the ruling class. The
capitalist economic system, however, contains within it the seeds of
its own destruction: capitalism necessitates the creation of an
ever-growing proletarian class, and a global revolution by the
proletariat will sweep away “the conditions for the existence of
class antagonisms and of classes generally” (Marx 1948, 75). The
state will fall along with the fall of classes: “The society that
will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association
of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will
then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the
spinning wheel and the bronze axe” (Engels 1884/1978, 755). In a
communist vision, capitalism is a necessary but transitional and
ephemeral order of things; the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by
forces it unleashed itself is necessary to attain a new world order,
“in which the free development of each is the condition for the
free development of all” (Marx 1948, 75). World peace and freedom
for all, especially freedom from the “alienated” or
“estranged” labor (Marx 1844/1978, 71–81) produced under
capitalism, will be achieved through the transformation of a capitalist
to a communist social order: “In proportion as the antagonism
between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation
to another will come to an end” (73).

The Russian revolutionary, V.I. Lenin, drew on Marx to argue that
the proletarian class needed to seize the coercive apparatus of the
state to oppress the resisters and exploiters, the bourgeoisie,
however, Lenin was committed to world revolution, and to the view that
the state is “the organ of class rule,” and that even the
“proletarian state will begin to wither away immediately after
its victory because the state is unnecessary and cannot exist in a
society in which there are no class antagonisms” (Lenin 1978,
135). Later Soviet leaders and elites who rejected Western proposals
for world federation somewhat inconsistently envisaged the
transcendence of nation-states and world capitalism, and the
establishment of a world socialist economy governed by a
“Bolshevik World State” (Goodman 1953, 231). In communist
ideology, ultimately, balance-of-power politics between states enjoying
unrestricted sovereignty did not cause war; the real cause of war was
capitalism. In practice, the Soviet Union's internally and
externally repressive policies made a mockery of socialist ideals of a
classless society, or a world of peaceful socialist republics, and the
disintegration of the Soviet Union itself spelled the practical end of
one alternative to a capitalist economic world order.

Today, proposals for a world government with coercive powers and
centralized authority structures compete with proposals for
noncoercive, decentralized structures of “global
governance.” Critical assessments of this evolution from
“world government” to “global governance” have
accompanied a revival of arguments for world government in intellectual
debates in international relations theory as well as political theory
about global order and justice (Cabrera 2004; Tännsjö 2008;
Weiss 2009).

Contemporary international relations theory developed out of the
urgent need to explain and predict the causes of war and peace between
sovereign states existing in a condition of anarchy, or the lack of a
central overarching authority.

Contemporary international “realists” or
“neorealists” claim not to evaluate the contemporary states
system in normative terms. They liken the international order to a
Hobbesian state of nature, where notions of justice and injustice have
no place, and in which each unit is rationally motivated to pursue
every means within its power to assure its own survival, even at the
expense of others' basic interests. Kenneth Waltz, in his seminal
account of neorealism, Theory of International Politics,
however, clearly favors a system of sovereign states over a world
government (1979, 111–2). World government, according to Waltz, would
not deliver universal, disinterested, impartial justice, order or
security, but like domestic governments, it would be driven by its own
particular or exclusive organizational interests, which it would pursue
at the expense of the interests and freedom of states. Thus, while
Waltz laments international anarchy as a necessary feature of
interstate relations, he also celebrates its virtues, one of which he
claims is the space it affords national freedom. With this argument,
Waltz seems to be making a normative claim that an atomistic order of
sovereign states is preferable from a moral point of view to a more
integrated one that might impose burdens on states and inhibit their
autonomy (Lu 2006). These conclusions are ironic since the neorealist
explanation of the cause of interstate war is the very condition of
international anarchy, understood as the absence of a world government
with supreme authority. The contemporary realist view is that this
feature of the states system is an unalterable social fact; wars
between states are thus tragedies of the unavoidable kind (Mearsheimer
2001).

William Scheuerman has argued recently (2011, 67–97), however, that
so-called “classical” realists of the mid-twentieth century
were more sympathetic to ideas of global institutional reform than
contemporary realists. “Classical” and
“progressive” realists such as Reinhold Niebuhr, E.H. Carr,
and Hans Morgenthau, as well as John Herz and Frederick Schuman,
supported a global reformist agenda, prompted by the advent of economic
globalization, technological change, modern total warfare, and the
nuclear revolution. Although a desirable end-goal, the feasibility of
global political change towards a world government in the form of a
global federal system, according to Reinhold Niebuhr, would depend on
deeper global social integration and cohesion than was evident in the
mid-twentieth century (Scheuerman 2011, 73). In addition, Niebuhr was
concerned that absent the required social and cultural basis for global
political unity, the achievement of world government would be
undesirable, since in such conditions, a world government would require
authoritarian devices to rule, raising the specter of a global
tyrannical power (ibid., 72–6).

“International society” theorists, or the “English
school,” argue that although there is no central overriding
authority above sovereign states, their relations are not wholly
lawless or devoid of authoritative and enforceable norms and rules for
conduct. The anarchy between states does not preclude the concept of a
norm-governed society of states (Bull 1977). Since ‘international
society’ theorists do not see the absence of a central global
authority as necessitating a state-eat-state world, they regard the
idea of world government as unnecessary, and potentially dangerous,
since it may serve as a cloak in the struggle for imperial domination
between states. Martin Wight has noted that the moral ideals of
cosmopolitanism typically translate in practice into political tyranny
and imperialism (1991). As an alternative to world government, and
echoing both Rousseau and Kant, Chris Brown forwards “the ideal
of a plurality of morally autonomous, just communities related to one
another in a framework of peace and law” (1995, 106).
Establishing an international society, ideally conceived, would make a
supreme world government unnecessary.

Liberal internationalist accounts of world order are motivated by
more than just the traditional preoccupation with problems of war and
peace. This school of international relations thought, more than the
preceding two, is explicitly critical of traditional accounts of state
sovereignty. Richard Falk has depicted the contemporary world order as
one of “inhumane governance,” identifying the following
ills: global severe poverty affecting more than one billion human
beings, denial of human rights to socially and culturally vulnerable
groups, the persistent use and threat of war as an instrument of
politics, environmental degradation, and the lack of transnational
democratic accountability (1995, 1–2). A liberal internationalist
agenda is advanced when progress is made on alleviating or correcting
these ills. However, Falk is explicit that “humane governance can
be achieved without world government, and that this is both
the more likely and more desirable course of action” (8). By
world government, Falk means a form of global political organization
that has, at minimum, the following features: “compulsory
peaceful settlement of all disputes by third-party decision in
accordance with law; general and complete disarmament at the state and
regional levels; a global legislative capacity backed up by enforcement
capabilities; and some form of centralized leadership” (7).
Instead of world government, Falk calls for “transnational
democratic initiatives” from global civil society as well as
United Nations reform, both of which would challenge and complement the
statist and market forces that currently produce our contemporary
global ills (207).

While many contemporary international relations theorists seem to
reject the feasibility or desirability of world government,
constructivist theorist Alexander Wendt has argued that the
“logic of anarchy” contains within it the seeds of
transformation towards a “global monopoly on the legitimate use
of organized violence—a world state” (2003, 491). Using
Aristotelian and Hegelian insights, Wendt offers a teleological
account of the development of world order from an anarchic states
system to a world state, arguing that “the struggle for
recognition between states will have the same outcome as that between
individuals, collective identity formation and eventually a
state” (493). Technological changes, especially those that
increase the “costs of war” as well as “the scale on
which it is possible to organize a state,” affect the struggle
for recognition among states, undermining their self-sufficiency and
making a world state “inevitable” (493–4). Wendt
draws on the work of Daniel Deudney (1995 and 1999), who has argued
that the evolution of destructive technology makes states as
vulnerable as individuals in a Hobbesian state of nature: “Hence
nuclear one-worldism—just as the risks of the state of nature
made it functional for individuals to submit to a common power,
changes in the forces of destruction increasingly make it functional
for states to do so as well” (Wendt 2003, 508). Deudney's
reconstruction of a republican tradition in international relations
theory entails the view that, prompted by the globalization of mutual
vulnerability to destruction, a global structural shift from
interstate anarchy to substantive world government characterized by
federal-republican arrangements, “would not be something
fundamentally novel [at the conceptual level], but simply the
continuation of a long familiar pattern” (2007,
275–7).

World state formation, according to Wendt, would be characterized by
the emergence of “a universal security community,” in which
members expect to resolve conflicts peacefully rather than through
force; a “universal collective security” system that
ensures the protection of each member should “crimes”
occur; and a “universal supranational authority” that can
make binding authoritative decisions about the collective use of force
(505). Driving this transformation is the struggle for recognition, and
the “political development of the system will not end until the
subjectivity of all individuals and groups is recognized and protected
by a global Weberian state” (506).

Wendt recognizes that powerful states enjoying the benefits of
asymmetrical recognition may be most resistant to world state
formation. He argues, however, that with the diffusion of greater
violence potential to smaller powers (such as al-Qaeda and North
Korea), “the ability of Great Powers to insulate themselves from
global demands for recognition will erode, making it more and more
difficult to sustain a system in which their power and privileges are
not tied to an enforceable rule of law” (524). Based on the
assumption that systems tend to develop toward stable end-states, a
world state in which individuals and “states alike will have lost
the negative freedom to engage in unilateral violence, but gained the
positive freedom of fully recognized subjectivity” (525) is the
inevitable end-state of the human struggle for recognition. At the same
time that Wendt sees world state formation as an inevitable trajectory
of the struggle for recognition between individuals and groups, he
argues that a world state could take various forms: while
collectivizing organized violence, it need not collectivize on a global
scale culture, economy or local politics; while requiring a structure
that “can command and enforce a collective response to
threats,” it need not abolish national armies, or require a
single UN army; and while it requires a procedure for making binding
choices, “it would not even require a world
‘government’, if by this we mean a unitary body with one
leader whose decisions are final” (506).

We now turn to debates about world government among contemporary
liberal theorists. Since the publication of John Rawls's landmark
A Theory of Justice in 1971, liberal theorists such as Charles
Beitz and Thomas Pogge have sought to formulate a cosmopolitan version
of liberalism by extending Rawlsian principles of domestic justice to
the international realm. According to Beitz, a cosmopolitan liberal
conception of international morality is “concerned with the moral
relations of members of a universal community in which state boundaries
have a merely derivative significance” (1999a, 181–2).
Cosmopolitan liberalism evaluates the morality of domestic and
international institutions based on “an impartial consideration
of the claims of each person who would be affected” (1999b, 287).
A cosmopolitan liberal theory of global justice thus begins with a
conception of humanity as a common moral community of free and equal
persons. This moral cosmopolitanism that Beitz and other liberal
theorists endorse, however, is distinct from political or institutional
cosmopolitanism in the form of a world state or government (Beitz
1994).

Although Rawls himself rejects cosmopolitan liberalism, disagreeing
with his liberal critics on several critical issues related to global
distributive justice, they are united in their agreement that a world
state is not part of a liberal ideal for world order. In his treatise
on global order, The Law of Peoples, Rawls forwards the
concept of a society of peoples, governed by principles that will
accommodate “cooperative associations and federations among
peoples, but will not affirm a world-state” (1999, 36). He
explicitly states his reason for rejecting the idea of a world state or
government: “Here I follow Kant's lead in Perpetual
Peace (1795) in thinking that a world government—by which
I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally
exercised by central governments—would either be a global
despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent
civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their
political freedom and autonomy” (36). Other liberal thinkers have
similarly rejected the desirability of world government in the form of
a domestic state writ large to cover the entire globe (Beitz 1999, 182;
Jones 1999, 229; Tan 1994, 100; Tan 2000; Pogge 1988, 285; Satz 1999,
77–8).

In a related objection, “communitarian” liberals, such as
Michael Walzer, argue against a centralized world government as a
threat to social pluralism. Walzer thus endorses “sovereign
statehood” as “a way of protecting distinct historical
cultures, sometimes national, sometimes ethnic/religious in
character,” and rejects a centralized global order because he
does not “see how it could accommodate anything like the range
of cultural and religious difference that we see around us
today. … For some cultures and most orthodox religions can only
survive if they are permitted degrees of separation that are
incompatible with globalism. And so the survival of these groups would
be at risk; under the rules of the global state, they would not be
able to sustain and pass on their way of life” (2004, 172 and
176). At the same time that distinct communities may constitute
intrinsic human goods, Walzer also endorses social and political
pluralism as an instrumental good: given the diversity of human
values, he argues that they “are best pursued politically in
circumstances where there are many avenues of pursuit, many agents in
pursuit. The dream of a single agent—the enlightened despot, the
civilizing imperium, the communist vanguard, the global state—is
a delusion” (188). A world of distinct, autonomous communities
may be important to curbing the appetite of a hegemonic or global
state to re-make the world in its own image.

The liberal rejection of world government does not mean, however,
that most liberal political theorists are proponents of the status quo
or traditional state sovereignty. Rawls's rejection of a world
government does not negate the legitimacy and desirability of
establishing international or transnational institutions to regulate
cooperation between peoples and even to discharge certain common
inter-societal duties. Thus, after his rejection of a world state,
Rawls goes on to say that in a well-ordered society of peoples,
organizations “(such as the United Nations ideally conceived) may
have the authority to express for the society of well-ordered peoples
their condemnation of unjust domestic institutions in other countries
and clear cases of the violation of human rights. In grave cases they
may try to correct them by economic sanctions, or even by military
intervention. The scope of these powers covers all peoples and reaches
their domestic affairs” (36). Rawls's vision of global
order clearly rejects a world of atomistic sovereign states with the
traditional powers of absolute sovereignty. Instead, his global vision
includes “new institutions and practices” to
“constrain outlaw states when they appear” (48), to promote
human rights, and to discharge the duty of assistance owed to burdened
societies.

Thomas Pogge argues that realizing “a peaceful and
ecologically sound future will … require supranational
institutions and organizations that limit the sovereignty rights of
states more severely than is the current practice” (2000, 213).
He sees this development to be possible only when a majority of states
are stable democracies (213–4). Pogge thus appears to agree with Rawls
that the path to perpetual peace (and environmental safety) lies in
promoting the development of well-ordered states, characterized by
democratically representative, responsive and responsible domestic
governments.

As these lines of argument by Rawls and Pogge suggest, liberals have
been quick to reject framing the choice of world orders as one between
either a world of traditional sovereign states or a
world with a global central government. Pogge has asserted that
liberals should “dispense with the traditional concept of
sovereignty and leave behind all-or-nothing debates about world
government.” Instead, he argues for an “intermediate
solution that provides for some central organs of world government
without, however, investing them with [exclusive] ‘ultimate
sovereign power and authority’” (1988, 285). In this
“multi-layered scheme in which ultimate political authority is
vertically dispersed”, states that retain ultimate political
authority in some areas would be juxtaposed with a world government
with “central coercive mechanisms of law enforcement” that
has ultimate political authority in other areas (Pogge 2009, 205–6).
Debra Satz has also argued that framing the choice as one between the
current states system and “an all-powerful world-state”
poses a false dilemma: “the contrast between a system of
sovereign states and a centralized world-state is too crude. There are
many other possibilities, including a state system restrained by
international and intergovernmental institutions, a non-state-based
economic system, a global separation-of-powers scheme, international
federalism, and regional political-economic structures, such as those
currently being developed in western Europe and the Americas (via
NAFTA)” (1999, 77–8).

As the many liberal proposals for moral improvement of the world
order indicate, liberal objections to world government—whether
they take the form of tyranny/homogeneity arguments and/or the
inefficiency/soullessness objections—are not motivated by a
complacent attitude towards the contemporary world order and its
resulting conditions (Pogge 2000). As Charles Jones has put it, these
valid and plausible objections to world government do not show that
“the status quo is preferable to some alternative
arrangement” (1999, 229). While liberal theorists acknowledge the
tyrannical potential of a world government, they also acknowledge that
“sovereign states are themselves often the cause of the
rights-violations of their citizens” (229). Kok-Chor Tan
characterizes liberal proposals for world order to involve, therefore,
neither world government nor absolute state sovereignty. Instead,
liberals have argued consistently for restrictions on the traditional
powers of sovereignty, as well as for the vertical dispersion of
sovereignty, “upwards towards supranational bodies, and also
downwards toward particular communities within states” (2000,
101). In such a world order, states become “another level of
appeal, and not the sole and final one” (101).

David Held argues that this dispersion of sovereignty is inevitable
given that the nation-state does not exist in an insular world, but a
highly interdependent and complex system: the contemporary reality
consists of a globalized economy, international organizations, regional
and global institutions, international law, and military alliances, all
of which operate to shape and constrain individual states. Although
national sovereignty still has a place in the contemporary world order,
“interconnected authority structures … displace notions of
sovereignty as an illimitable, indivisible and exclusive form of public
power” (1995, 137). In Held's account of cosmopolitan
democracy, the universal realization of the liberal ideal of autonomy,
derived from Kant, ultimately requires long-term institutional
developments such as the creation of a global parliament, an
international criminal court, the demilitarization of states, and
global distributive justice in the form of a guaranteed annual income
for each individual (279–80).

Democratic, republican and critical theorists have become concerned
with the global context of order and justice due to its importance for
establishing protective external conditions for the moral and political
achievements of centuries of domestic democratic political struggle.
Traditionally, the main global threat was interstate war, thus the
projects for perpetual peace. Today, democratic theorists worry that
contemporary processes of globalization are undermining the
achievements of democratic societies in the areas of civil and social
rights such as access to education and healthcare, and the economic
securities provided by the welfare state. From this perspective,
economic globalization and the growing power of international and
transnational institutions pose a potential threat to democratic ideals
of civic equality and self-determination. The task of the democratic
theorist is to think about how democracies can respond to these global
developments in ways that best help preserve the fragile achievements
of domestic democratic justice (Habermas 2006; see also Scheuerman
2008). Increasingly, theorists of global democratic reform envisage the
need to develop new institutions and practices of representation and
accountability rather than merely to extend traditional constitutional
models and electoral mechanisms of domestic democratic governance
(Archibugi 2008; Macdonald 2008; Marchetti 2008).

Key to discussions in democratic, republican and critical theory
about global order and justice is the political ideal of nondomination.
Neo-republican theorist Philip Pettit understands commitment to this
ideal to entail reducing people's vulnerability to alien control
or the arbitrary power of others to interfere with their choices and
their lives. In the international context, Pettit has outlined a
“republican law of peoples” that has the twin goals of
ensuring that every people is represented by a non-dominating
government in a non-dominating international order (2010). Starting
with a world of states, Pettit argues that a state which is
“effective and representative of its people” fulfills the
republican ideal of nondomination, and “it would be objectionably
intrusive of other agents in the international order” to bypass
such states and assume responsibility for its members (2010, 71–2). A
legitimate international order is one “in which effective,
representative states avoid domination—whether by another
state, or by a non-state body—and seek to enable other states
to be effective and representative too” (73). In an international
context, the sources of domination include other states;
“non-domestic, private bodies” such as “corporations,
churches, terrorist movements, even powerful individuals”; and
“non-domestic, public bodies” such as the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(77). While representative states realize nondomination internally for
their members, individuals' enjoyment of freedom as nondomination
is not secured unless their states are protected in their external
relations from dominating strategies, including “intentional
obstruction, coercion, deception, and manipulation” as well as
“invigilation”, and “intimidation” (74).

Pettit's account presupposes the legitimacy of domestic
democracies that ensure nondomination as a starting point for thinking
about a legitimate international order, and he explicitly rejects the
idea of a world state, modeled on a domestic republican regime, as an
infeasible remedy for the challenges posed by domination in an
international context (2010, 81; but see Koenig-Archibugi 2011). There
is no easy solution, but Pettit considers feasible improvements to the
current international order can be made by further developing
multilateral “international agencies and forums by means of which
states can work out their problems and relations in a space of more or
less common reasons” as well as fostering greater solidarity
among subgroups of weaker states so that they can form rival blocs that
can resist domination by more powerful agents (84). While Pettit is
mostly concerned with the dominating potential of powerful states, and
considers international agencies to be less threatening (86), Cecile
Laborde adds to Pettit's account not only a concern for
agent-relative domination, but also, and more centrally, systemic
domination, which entails a greater awareness of the dominating
potential of international organizations such as the International
Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization and the World Bank (2010). One
of the ways that powerful states dominate weak states is by
“entrenching and institutionalizing” their dominant
position through unfair international social structures in areas such
as trade (2010, 57).

Indeed, Nancy Kokaz, in a republican interpretation of Rawls's
Law of Peoples, argues that “a global republic cannot be
dismissed by a civic [republican] theory of global justice”
(2005, 94). The civic pluralist ideal that is threatened by the advent
of global capitalism and ensuing deracination requires “a global
state powerful enough to protect local communities” from the
homogenizing tendencies and “excesses of global capitalism”
(93). In a further development of republican ideas about global order
and justice, James Bohman has argued that a republican ideal of freedom
as nondomination in the new global “circumstances of
politics” requires political struggle in the direction of
transnational democracy (2004 and 2007). According to Bohman,
“under conditions of globalization, freedom from tyranny and
domination cannot be achieved without extending our political ideals of
democracy, community and membership” (2004, 352). Not only are
currently bounded democratic communities ineffective in resisting new
global sources and forms of domination, they are also
“potentially self-defeating”, constituting “a
thousand tiny fortresses in which the oldest form of domination is
practiced at many different levels: the domination of noncitizens by
citizens, or nonmembers by members, using their ability to command
noninterference much like those who live within gated
communities” (2007, 175 and 180). Daniele Archibugi has termed
this “democratic schizophrenia: to engage in a certain
[democratic] behavior on the inside and indulge in the opposite
[undemocratic] behavior on the outside” (2008, 6). Such vicious
circles of “democratic domination” can only be overcome by
making borders, membership and jurisdiction the subjects of democratic
deliberation across dêmoi (Bohman 2007, 179).
Whether or not democracy serves global justice depends on the
possibility of transnational democratization, and Bohman sees two
primary agents of such transformation, in democratic states pursuing
“broadly federalist and regional projects of political
integration,” such as the European Union, and in the less
institutionalized activities of “participants in transnational
public spheres and associations” (189).

Critical theorist Iris Marion Young similarly calls for a global
politics of nondomination, that would support “a vision of local
and cultural autonomy in the context of global regulatory
regimes” (2002, 237). Her model of global
governance—“a post-sovereign alternative to the existing
states system” (2000, 238)—entails a “decentred
diverse democratic federalism” (253). While everyday governance
would be primarily local, it would take place in the context of global
regulatory regimes, built upon existing international institutions,
that would be functionally defined to deal with “(1) peace and
security, (2) environment, (3) trade and finance, (4) direct
investment and capital utilization, (5) communications and
transportation, (6) human rights, including labor standards and
welfare rights, (7) citizenship and migration” (2002,
267). Young envisages these global regulatory regimes to apply not
only to states, but also to non-state organizations, such as
corporations, and individuals. In terms of feasibility, Young points
to the development of a robust “global public sphere”
(Habermas 1998) as crucial to bringing about “stronger global
regulatory institutions tied to principles of global and local
democracy” (Young 2002, 272).

While democratic and critical theorists such as Young argue that
“global governance should be organized democratically”
(265), Anne-Marie Slaughter has rejected the idea of cosmopolitan
democracy and a global parliament as infeasible and unwieldy (2004, 8
and 238). Slaughter is an advocate of “global governance,”
in the sense of “a much looser and less threatening concept of
collective organization and regulation without coercion,” to
solve common global problems such as transnational crime, terrorism,
and environmental destruction (9). According to Slaughter, states are
not unitary, but “disaggregated” and increasingly
“networked” through information, enforcement, and
harmonization networks (167)—producing “a world of
governments, with all the different institutions that perform the basic
functions of governments—legislation, adjudication,
implementation—interacting both with each other domestically
and also with their foreign and supranational counterparts” (5).
A networked world order, she argues, “would be a more effective
and potentially more just world order than either what we have today or
a world government in which a set of global institutions perched above
nation-states enforced global rules” (6–7). Although Slaughter is
keen to highlight the promise of “global governance through
government networks” as “good public policy for the world
and good national foreign policy” (261), she acknowledges that in
contemporary world conditions of radical social, economic and political
inequality between states and peoples, effective and fair global
governance will require the networks comprising global governance to
abide by the norms of “global deliberative equality,”
toleration of reasonable and legitimate difference, and “positive
comity” in the form of consultation and active assistance between
organizations; in addition, global governance networks would need to be
made more accountable through a system of checks and balances, and more
responsive through the principle of subsidiarity (244–60). Without
movement towards a more equitable world of mutual respect, however, it
is difficult to see actually existing global governance networks
operating in an impartial and generous spirit to help “all
nations and their peoples to achieve greater peace, prosperity,
stewardship of the earth, and minimum standards of human dignity”
(166).

In this vein, international relations scholar Thomas Weiss has
lamented the intellectual and political shifts in perspective from
world government to global governance, arguing that current voluntary
associations, organizations and networks at the global level are
“so obviously inadequate” to meeting global challenges that
we “are obliged to ask ourselves whether we can approach anything
that resembles effective governance for the world without institutions
with some supranational characteristics at the global level”
(2009, 264).

Some think that the idea of world government involves a paradox:
however it is conceived institutionally, when the winning conditions
exist for establishing a desirable form of world government or global
governance—one that will guarantee human security with
individual liberty, protect the environment, and advance global social
justice—it will no longer be necessary (Nielsen 1988, 276).
Once all governments, especially the most powerful ones, are willing to
use their power to build government networks that promote global peace,
justice and environmental protection, and to cede some traditional
rights of sovereignty to supranational institutions in areas such as
the use of military force, the management and protection of the
environment and natural resources, and the distribution of wealth, the
establishment of a global political authority might seem superfluous.
As Alexander Wendt has pointed out, however, a stable end-state of
world order development requires such ideal conditions, should they
ever develop, to become institutionalized into a world state that
enacts “a global monopoly on the legitimate use of organized
violence” (491); enforcement mechanisms are not superfluous,
since there is always the possibility of violations by outlaw states
and groups. In a similar vein, the Swedish philosopher Torbjörn
Tännsjö has argued that neither voluntary multilateral
cooperation under conditions of anarchy, nor a hybrid arrangement of
“shared sovereignty between the world government and
nation-states”, will be effective in resolving contemporary
challenges in the realms of human security, global justice and the
environment (2008, 122–125). Since sovereignty is indivisible,
Tännsjö posits that a world state must have ultimate
decision-making authority over nation-states over jurisdictional
issues: “Unless there are sanctions available to the central
authority to back up a decision as to where a question is to be
handled, the system of states will be thrown back into a state of
nature” (125–6).

One might wonder, however, if linking the realization of
cosmopolitan ethical aims to a world government agenda may misidentify
the barriers to their realization (Lu 2006, 106–7). Thus Pogge has
argued for a Global Resources Dividend (GRD) to eradicate global severe
poverty (2000, 196–215) that could work effectively with a
decentralized method of enforcement, but notes, “Without the
support of the US and the EU, massive global poverty and starvation
will certainly not be eradicated in our lifetimes” (211).
Similarly, the former UN Secretary-General's special envoy for
HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, has not lamented the absence of a
world government as the cause of the lack of treatment for the large
majority of Africa's infected population; instead, after being
disappointed time after time by the chasm between promised and actually
delivered funds to help the seven million (projected to rise eventually
to thirty million) poor suffering from AIDS/HIV in Africa, he has
condemned “the wealthy governments of the western world”
because they “simply cannot be trusted to deliver the
goods” (2006, 198). A world government, or global governance
structure, that similarly lacks a political commitment to such issues,
would most likely also fail to deliver on the goods.

According to the Independent Working Group on the Future of the
United Nations, by the middle of this century, “it is likely that
the nature of statehood and assumptions about national sovereignty will
have evolved in response to global needs and to an enlarged sense of
world community” (quoted in Baratta 2004, 527). Given
contemporary world conditions, marked by radical economic inequalities
and vast power disparities, the question of whose “sense
of world community” and whose “global needs”
will define the global political agenda and order, might very well be
obscured by the discourse of “global governance.”

Proponents of world government may be heartened by the realization of
one institutional development in the contemporary world
order—the establishment of an International Criminal Court (ICC)
to try individuals, including heads of state, for the offences of
genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The ICC is a
treaty-based international institution, and its jurisdiction is
limited by the concept of “complementarity,” which allows
the Court to exercise its jurisdiction only when domestic national
courts fail to prosecute due to lack of will or incompetence. In
principle, then, the ICC does not threaten to undermine the authority
of well-functioning domestic legal orders, and may simultaneously
limit and enhance state rights and responsibilities. Global
authority thus need not undermine national authority structures. It
may be disturbing to some, however, that the first institution of
cosmopolitan justice to be entrenched at the international level is
not concerned with global distributive justice, but with global
criminal justice. While the establishment of the ICC is consistent
with cosmopolitanism, a world order that is quick to punish through
the ICC, but slow to help empower the destitute and marginalized,
would constitute a perversion rather than a fulfillment cosmopolitan
morality.

World government as an ideal expresses an aspiration for
law-governed, just and peaceful relations between the diverse groups
that comprise a common moral community of humankind. World government
as an idea or proposal about how to organize the world
politically, however, may or may not meet that ideal. That is, even if
there were a world state with authoritative legislative, adjudicative
and enforcement powers, the elimination of organized violence, poverty
and environmental degradation would not automatically follow. The
proponents of global governance face a similar challenge. It remains to
be seen whether the developing agents, networks and structures of
global governance can effectively promote environmental protection;
will be able to develop authoritative mechanisms for disciplining the
use of force, by nonstate actors as well as by the world's most
powerful states; and will serve the interests of the bottom half of
humanity barely eking out a living, even if it means demanding a small
sacrifice from the fortunate fifteen percent of humankind living in the
world's high-income economies. For those who lament present day
conditions, Wendt's teleological theory of world order
development might provide some comfort and inspiration in reminding us
that history is not over.

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